


Queen of Flowers

by TheLadyoftheHouse



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Baby Ben Solo, Dreams and Nightmares, Force Ghost Padmé Amidala, Gen, Grandma Padmé, Hurt/Comfort, If You Squint - Freeform, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Reylo - Freeform, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 20:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14221440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLadyoftheHouse/pseuds/TheLadyoftheHouse
Summary: It wasn't always this way...I remember a woman...with flowers in her hair...The Supreme Leader is plagued with nightmares. But even the darkest night ends with a sunrise.





	Queen of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the gorgeous [work](http://amyillu.tumblr.com/post/142315504069/i-like-to-think-little-ben-organa-solo-was-visited) of Amy Scott.

* * *

 

_Under tower and balcony,_

_By garden-wall and gallery,_

_A gleaming shape she floated by,_

_Dead-pale between the houses high,_

_Silent into Camelot._

_Out upon the wharfs they came,_

_Knight and burgher, lord and dame,_

_And round the prow they read her name,_

The Lady of Shalott _._

_-_ "The Lady of Shalott," Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren shot upright in his bed with a strangled shout, the tendrils of his nightmare still clinging stubbornly to his temples. With shaking breaths and hands, he pushed the sweat-dampened hair back from his face and propped his elbows on his knees. Even now, with the slinking voice of his Master no longer curdling his brain cells and the First Order at last under his rule, the Supreme Leader was plagued with nightmares.

 

His breathing came in shuddering gulps, bordering on sobs. He refused to allow himself the luxury of tears. It was beneath and beyond him now. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, as if he could push the traitorous tears back into his skull.

 

As all his nightmares were, this dream had been excruciatingly vivid. The stench of blood and burning flesh still clung to his nostrils, his ears rang with the howling of dying men, the screams a powerful girl in heart-stopping agony. Red spots danced across his eyelids, flashing blinding white-blue toward the end. Pale muscles twitched in the ambient light of distant stars, remembering slashes and parries that never connected, and the few that did. His scars ached afresh with phantom pains. The worst of his nightmares always came from memories that the darkness in his mind had twisted to its whim. That slithering, seductive voice was gone and his Master was ashes now, but his mind still warped the events into a horrorshow of its own devising.

 

In this version, the hard-won fight proved futile, and he watched, helpless as that girl, that extraordinary little shard of starlight made flesh, was cut down again and again. Sometimes the red guards got the best of her (how could they not, with all their training and her with so little?) and she fell to their sizzling weapons. Other times it was his Master, alive and howling with glee at the Light’s destruction. Tonight, it was his own blade that did it, attached to a hand that didn’t feel like his own. Whoever was ultimately responsible for her death, her screams remained the same, and her fading hazel eyes never left his as she hit the bloody floor and her starlight flickered out, tearing his soul out with it.

 

Cursing himself for his weakness, he tentatively felt out through the Force, reaching across a shimmering spun-silk thread that stretched galaxies wide. The thrumming bond lay silent. The light shone, cold and harsh away from him, casting him into deep shadows

 

Kylo was, again, alone. Always alone.

 

The hollowness under his rib cage expanded, a black hole engulfing his insides until he was just a man-shaped shell that contained the vacuum of space. He filled the void with rage and grief and fear and loneliness, so much loneliness. He packed them tight so that no light could reach through the chinks in his barricade.

 

_This way is better_ , he thought to himself, _this way the darkness will have a home in me. Maybe then I will belong to something._

 

With a sound that could’ve been a snarl or a whimper, he swung out of bed. His bare feet slapped against cold durasteel floors as he called his robe to his hand mid-stride across his quarters. It provided no real warmth and stuck to his clammy skin, but it felt incorrect to be bare-chested in the presence of the relic.

 

The door to Vader’s shrine slid open with a hiss at Kylo’s approach. He wished he could say that the sight of the warped visage eased the weight on his chest that kept him from breathing properly, but he could not lie in the face of his progenitor, not even to himself. The door closed behind him. Kylo and Vader faced each other in silence.

 

The supplicant bowed his head in reverence and sat heavily on the hard seat before the reliquary. He did not speak, he did not blink, he struggled to breathe. He waited. Staring intently into the craters that had been the mask’s eyes, he waited. For a sign, a certainty, a shift of the oppressive darkness, anything that could lead him out of this conflict.

 

His eyes stung from the lack of sleep and the dreadnought’s dry recycled air and the grit of stifled tears. His heart thudded erratically in his chest, the muscle pressing painfully into his sternum. He felt too big for his own skin and yet so small that he barely existed. His lungs could not expand enough despite him gulping desperately for air. His fingers flexed and gripped the arms of the seat, scarred knuckles creaking under the pressure. He jerked forward, digging his elbows into his knees as he clasped his shaking hands in prayer, pressing his forehead into the bones hard enough to bruise.

 

“Grandfather...please,” he choked. “Tell me what to do.”

 

Kylo attempted another shuddering breath, tasting bitter weakness on his tongue.

 

“I’m lost. I don’t know what to do…” He nearly bit through his lip in his strain to keep the sobs at bay.

“Please...help me…”

 

No sound came from the twisted maw of the death mask. No benediction slipped through its jagged, brittle teeth. No chilling, low rumble gave wisdom from the disembodied voice box. Darth Vader, had it ever been he that resided in the melted helm beyond death, offered no succor to his wayward grandson. The Force was silent in the mausoleum.

 

Even in his shroud of darkness, Kylo was still alone.

 

Hot, angry tears sped unbidden down sallow, scarred cheeks. _Weak._ Ragged sobs stuck hard in his throat, choking him. _Weak._ He raked hard fingers across his scalp, pulling at the long dark hair until he could feel it in his skull, threatening to tear his head open to relieve the pressure.

 

_WEAK._

 

His torso folded forward, tucking his long legs up under him on the bench. He stayed curled up there, weeping like a child, beating his fist against his head, praying for the power that the pain brought, the control that he sought. A rough voice that was probably his own, detached as it was, chanted over and over, until the word was not itself anymore: _please, please, please, please…_

 

He loathed himself, the great weakness of him, the conflict that had been his constant since he was a child. It was the only thing that Kylo Ren and Ben Solo had in common.

 

As his litany faded into slurred, soundless mumbles around cracked lips, his sobs continued to rip little chunks away from his barricade, until the emptiness was all he could feel. Not even his rage was left to him. He was left in the blinding darkness and the cold light; naked, raw, exposed, bleeding.

 

_Let me die here,_ he pleaded to the Force. _There is nothing left of me to torment, now._

 

He was answered with more silence.

 

And so Kylo waited, numb, his mind drifting aimlessly, until oblivion could find him.

 

Then, there was warmth.

 

Small, fragile, distant, but strong. Like a freshly lit taper flickering to life in a dark room. The flame brushed his cheek for a moment, enough to stir his mind into exhausted awareness. It felt...familiar. The gentleness of the touch caused the calcified remains of his heart to clench. A mother’s touch that he hadn’t realized he longed for now that he was grown. But this was not his mother’s caress that brushed his hair. It was different. Sadder, somehow.

 

The shadowed room slowly began to glow with an ethereal blue light, blurring through his tears. Warm, soft, dreamlike, but bright. Brighter than the shadows, chasing away the monsters, enveloping him in a protective aura. But sad. So very sad.

 

The light shifted, morphed, reformed into the shape of a woman. She was regally beautiful, with kind, dark eyes and a gentle smile that she graced on the hulking man curled into the chair before her. Her long, billowing robe was the blue of the sky’s zenith at bedtime, lullaby blue. It seemed that the whole of her being glowed with this deep, gentle hue. Her hair flowed behind her in endlessly undulating waves, a dark river studded with dozens of flowers. Soft, creamy white petals floated around her, carrying with them the scent of a distant world of beauty and light, sunshine and cool water and night blooming plants.

 

He was dreaming again, surely. The warmth of a slender hand ghosting over his hair was too gentle a thing to exist in this cold, angry place. This apparition couldn’t possibly be real. He raked over her incorporeal form with bleary, disbelieving eyes.

 

Then he remembered.

 

It had not always been this way. There had been a woman with flowers in her hair...

 

Exhausted and delirious, Kylo’s mind flew back to a warm little apartment on Chandrila and settled in the bedroom of his five-year-old self. Ears too big for his little head, black curls flopping every which way, eyes almost permanently red and tired from crying and nightmares. It had been a night similar to this one: cold, dark, lonely. His father was away on business, his mother was poring over her plans for a brighter tomorrow. All the while, little Ben Solo sobbed and hiccupped quietly at the shadow monsters that had migrated from his closet to his mind. Looking back nearly a quarter century later, he couldn’t remember the images that had so frightened him, but the feeling that even his parents, shining beacons of justice and goodness that they were, couldn’t protect him from this darkness. He had been right.

 

She had opened her arms to him, beckoning the crying child into her breast. Without hesitation, Ben had curled up in her embrace and sighed in blessed relief as love and protection washed over him, filling the dark corners of his mind with warm, flickering light. She had held him close to her for a long while before pulling away, taking his sleepy face between her hands and tilting it up to look at her. Her smile was achingly melancholy, and little Ben had tiredly thought that angels like her should never have to be sad. She had brushed his hair back from his sweaty forehead, pressed a moth’s wing kiss to his freckled head, and faded into a wisp of blue light and white petals, leaving only the scent of flowers behind.

 

Kylo allowed the dream-memory to drift through his tired mind, barely registering the faint blue glow through his heavy eyelids.

 

She reached out her slim, pale hands to softly cradle his face, brushing away his tears with insubstantial fingers. Small and insistent, they pried his hands from his head, soothing his tangles and hurts. He relaxed into the hard angles of the bench, not caring about the edges cutting into his already bruised skin. But her hands were stronger than his will, and she could have led him with the thinnest thread at that moment. With a gentle nudge between his shoulder blades, she pushed him out of the shrine and back to his bed, but not before casting a heartbroken glance back at the warped remains of Anakin Skywalker’s death mask. She seemed to sigh as she tugged the boy in his too-big body across his quarters, tiny in comparison to him, his bare feet shuffling across the cold floor. She was much smaller than he first remembered her. When had he outgrown even his memories? He fell heavily to the mattress and laid there, exhausted to his core as the blue woman’s warm hand returned to his head.

 

He hadn’t felt this drowsy in what felt like years. The rhythm of the hand stroking his hair lulled him to stillness, the scent of moonlit jasmine brought him to peace.

 

For a moment, there was no destiny, no Jedi, no First Order. For once, Kylo Ren could just...be. He could let the quiet sit in his bones, ease the aches in his muscles. For once the sides warring within him called a ceasefire, at least for the night. A single silent tear dropped onto his arm where it curled under his head, relief blooming tentatively in his stomach. He tried not to acknowledge the hope that this peace brought with it, fearing the deluge of pain that would come with it when it returned in the morning.

 

As he started to tense again, the warmth of a familiar embrace blanketed over him, somehow enough to cover the breadth of his massive shoulders. A low rush of barely-there sound brushed his consciousness.

 

_Sleep, sweetheart,_ whispered a quiet voice, a low hum soft at the back of his ear. _I will be with you. Don’t be afraid, Ben, you are so strong. Don’t be afraid…_

 

The sound of his discarded name should have galled him, ignited his righteous anger. But this...angel knew him, understood him, loved him unconditionally for all that he was, is, and ever would be. The way that family _should_. And he was too tired to be angry now. Sleep was encroaching on his mind and he could not deny it when it was normally so hard-won.

 

Kylo was vaguely aware of the delicate press of lips against his hair and the soothing murmurs of the blue lady from another life, before he succumbed to an entirely different kind of darkness. A dreamless, soundless rest after a lifetime of nightmares.

 

When the Supreme Leader awoke hours later with a start, the apparition was gone, leaving behind a flickering light inside his ribs and the scent of white flowers hanging in the air.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to my uncommon-law wifey and writing partner [Killtheselights](https://kill-these-lights.tumblr.com/) for beta reading and for this beauteous moodboard.
> 
> [](https://imgur.com/GsbufKt)


End file.
